Clash of the Cultures Leaves Audience Shell-bound

Param Sundari

Starring: Sidharth Malhotra, Jahnvi Kapoor, Siddhartha Shankar, Sanjay Kapoor, Abhishek Banerjee, Inayat Varma.

Direction: Tushar Jalota

Storytellers often base their premise on traditional tales. Time adds to tradition. Storytellers understand that like stones, stories too gather mass. The art is in ensuring that the mass is fresh and non-slippery. To pierce through the subterranean recesses of the collective mind is the story writer’s challenge. Either the wine must be new or the bottle or design. The short travel with director Tushar Jalota from fizzy Punjab to God’s Own Country is like a comfortable seat in a train that is travelling through every known predictable milestone and the passenger is served the predictable menu. Nothing new, nothing fresh, nothing worth recommending.

Param Sachdev (Sidharth Malhotra) is the son of successful businessman Parmeet Sachdev (Sanjay Kapoor). Unlike Papa Richie Rich, Param is a failed entrepreneur under the critical lens of Papa. A sliver of hope comes when Shekhar (Abhishek Banerjee) pitches a new business idea to Param. The idea is to invest in a dating website to find your soulmate. Contemporary verbiage such as algorithm, database, seed funding, revenue model, digital detox, local to global are peppered in a plenty. On a beta version of the website, Param finds his suggested soulmate in Sundari (Jahnavi Kapoor) of Thekkepatti in the beautiful backwaters of Nangiarkulangara, Alappuzha in Kerala where she runs a home stay unit. In search of his future soulmate and the hidden megabucks on the website, Param sets off with his friend Jaggi (Manjot Singh). Sundari is seemingly assisted by her younger sibling Ammu (Inayat Verma). Param is convinced that he has found his Sundari and woos her in conventional fashion only to be rejected in template boxes.

The village also has Bhargavan Nair (Renji Panicker) who is not only the heroine’s undeclared guardian but also the moral and morale keeper of the city. Stern without cause and loud without purpose, he discourages Param and Jaggi for no reason at all, unless wearing shorts instead of a dhoti is a local cultural challenge. It takes a while for Cupid to strike Sundari. Her additional challenge is the groom-in-waiting Venu Nair (Siddhartha Shankar) and insipid love trend makes its trite way through an innocuous local sporting event for adults, with events including spoon and lime race, sack race, tug of war, cannot get more juvenile.

The film, apart from reiterating the love of the contrasts, carries a script older than the hills. It also gets stuck in the rut of stereotypical ideas of Punjabis and Malayalis. Typically, it takes a while for the fun-loving Punjabi lads to understand that South is not Madras, and consequentially Rajinikanth. To stamp her cultural identity, Sundari has to loudly stress her Malayali identity by preferring Mohanlal over Rajini and such trivial inanities. Reference to Amma Pakoda, Punjabi superiority for allegedly knowing English, being lost in Kerala for lack of unified language, make light of a mindset than a larger show.

It is sufficiently immature to build a contemporary love story of the Punjabi boy and Malayali girl. It is worse that you do not back the story with a script that has no emotive gravitas. Even ‘Two States’ looks like a comparative masterpiece. The snide references to South culture and the contrasting hardsell of Kerala in a single scene of Sundari all sum up an amateur offering. To believe that an audience quarter past the 21st century would take a smooch as ‘something naughty’ is completely off the mark. Forget artificial intelligence, this is naturally moronic.

In the cast, Siddhartha Shankar as the unsuccessful arm of the love triangle looks more like a leftover than a preparation. Sanjay Kapoor tries hard to bring in the Punjabi flamboyance and fails. Inayat Varma mouths the typical, choti mooh badi bath. Abhishek Banarjee, in a short role, is realistic. The screen chemistry between Sidharth Malhotra and Jahnavi Kapoor is conspicuously missing. It is a clear case of miscasting Sid Malhotra as the young romantic careless hero. As a script that offers multiple opportunities, unfortunately, it goes abegging. Jahnavi’s bold career decision to take up roles which are not run of the mill are not backed by proportionate talent. A consistent abortive attempt is made to project Jahnavi in the Sridevi mould. The mould is only a mold. The brewing love story between the six packs of the hero and the pout of the Mohani Attam heroine goes astray. The final song ‘Bheegi Sari’, is a poor and faraway imitation of ‘Aaj Rapat Jaayen to Hame Na Uthaiyo’. No, not even the six-pack muscles of Sid Malhotra, or the rain-soaked sari of Jahnavi can save ‘Param Sundari’. Manjot Singh and Abhishek Banerjee are insufficient parameters to salvage a lost cause. Lost, even at the casting stage. The festival season does not augur well for Bollywood. ‘Param Sundari’ at best is a visual renewal of Kerala’s scenic grandeur.